World IPv6 Day: A Watershed Moment Towards a New Internet Protocol

Back In January, Cisco was among the very first to respond to the World IPv6 Day rallying cry launched by the Internet Society and major Internet content providers such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Akamai. Since then, we have been working across the industry with other participants, customers, and users to ensure that this global experiment was a success.

At midnight UTC on June 8 (5pm at Cisco Headquarters in California), www.cisco.com alongside hundreds of other World IPv6 Day participants announced reachability to IPv6 in the global Domain Name System. Millions of lines of code and countless man-hours of work over the past decade developing the various bits and pieces of IPv6 in network equipment and software across the globe were exercised in concert like never before. As we watched the various test sites and dashboards move to “green” status for IPv6, sighs of relief were heard followed by a sense of great satisfaction among everyone involved. 24 hours later, no major issues have been reported.

All in all, World IPv6 Day seems to have gone off without a hitch.

IPv6 is the only long-term solution the industry has available to continue Internet growth in the manner that the world has come to expect. We believe that this day will be looked back upon as a watershed moment in the global deployment of IPv6 – we have verified not only that IPv6 works on a global scale, but also that it can work alongside IPv4 until the day that we can all begin to turn IPv4 off.

Cisco has been involved in developing standards and products for IPv6 since its inception, and by being part of World IPv6 Day from the very start we have learned a great deal in how the various implementations over IPv6 operate with one another. We will be reporting more on our findings in the coming weeks – for now, it’s been an exciting 24 hours, and all those that helped get us here are going to get some much-needed rest.

Hi Mark,
now the IPv6 day is over and it seems that there is no more AAAA record for cisco.com.
It looks like weird problems, doesnt it ?
I use IPv6 on my home network via a tunnel broker (sixxs). Is there any (planned) opportunity to test IPv6 with any public Cisco host ?
Best regards, Thomas

I made a small a collection of interesting statistics gathering sites from World IPv6 Day at https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-16882 and welcome you to share your own there. Kudos to the whole Cisco team!

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